"You always appreciate it when people stick your neck out to support you."
"I got out of university and there was a general panic throughout my family as to what I was going to do. For about six months, I did this job in recruitment and I was just so awful at it. I jumped before I was pushed."
"But there comes a landing point, where you finally get to a stage where you have something to hang your hat on. Then your family see that this is definitely happening and you’re making a success of it."
"The job of a comedian is to make people laugh, but a lot of my interests are in politics so I’m going to use that."
"You have to have your own internal barometer of what is too far. I try and consider feelings of people in the audience. What you have to try and do is that when there is something that could be seen as a transgression, you actually have a reason to justify the joke."
"I’m interested in offence and why people take offence in certain ways about certain things."
"But I like the process of putting a show together and the impact that Edinburgh has on me as a performer."
"August is the time when I can feel myself getting stronger as a comedian. I’m at the height of my powers come September."
"One of the things I’ve stopped doing is going out of my way to make people feel OK about their mistakes."
"When we were growing up we were all asked to accept ourselves as British citizens, and I still hold on to this idea that multicultural Britain is possible."
"We were in denial about the extent to which Britain had cured itself of the poison of racism."
"I spend a lot of time bathing in a glow of consensus but you also have to be willing to say something to people who might not agree with you and take the consequences of what follows."
"Every day I wake up and think: ‘Am I part of the problem? Am I helping further entrench the political divide? All the raging mouthpieces of the right that I’m furious with - am I just the same but on the left?’ I have no easy answers to that."
"We’ve all been there - you find something moving, you commission a painting. I know one wall of my living room is taken up by a mural of the end of Toy Story 3."
"When refugees are at a distance it’s easy to be compassionate."
"In the event of a Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic dystopia, people with supplies of food and water could become warlords or chieftains in the social order that emerges out of the rubble."
"Brexit is a ceaseless grind of conversations about customs unions and backstops. Anything that can add an air of whimsical, childlike wonder to proceedings can only be a good thing."
"The important thing with Facebook is to remember that it played a role in facilitating Brexit because it inadvertently allowed leave-supporting groups to use harvested data to target key voters."
"Having spent half my time at university studying English literature, I know from experience that reading lists often contain more white men than Jacob Rees-Mogg’s last birthday party."
"I’m a standup comedian who can’t drive. I have never learned. I don’t trust my hand-eye coordination. You’re looking at someone who once dropped a cricket ball on to his own head during a routine catching practice; I don’t think it’s a great idea to have me in control of a high-speed metal death robot."
"And I can tell you from firsthand experience that our train system is a mess. Carriages are full of unhappy travellers packed together like sardines, who have inexplicably paid for the privilege of being incarcerated."
"When I was growing up, and periodically going to India to visit my grandmother, my classmates would often ask me about the trains. There was an exotic fascination with people sitting on top of the carriages."
"Frustration with the trains is inevitable, given the daily difficulties commuters face."
"I’ve given up trying to reason with people who despise me."
"I think that there’s a real appetite for opinion-driven satire, not just generic making jokes about what’s in the news but actually point-of-view-driven stuff."
